Moondance (1970)

(Previous attempts here and here.)

I have belabored the point about the first side of this album. Hearing "Old Old Woodstock" from Tupelo Honey recently, I realized I have surely oversold the whole thing. I mean, sweet God, Tupelo Honey is a masterpiece, and Blowin' Your Mind! and Astral Weeks. And the freakin' second side of Moondance. Nonetheless, it seems my platte hath troth and beachhead made. Oh the water, let it run all over me. This is five songs—"And it Stoned Me," "Moondance," "Crazy Love," "Caravan," and "Into the Mystic"—about birth, life, and the eternal, in totality as perfect as anything could ever hope to be. In them is found everything. Sometimes I wonder why I need anything else at all.

Them, "Gloria" (1964)

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Garage-rock actually did manage to seep down to my 10-, 11-, 12-year-old world in various screwy ways—church youth dance functions of one sort or another, mostly—and even back then I had "Gloria" pegged as the one they all played (along with, in my neck of the woods anyway, "Surfin' Bird" and often "Liar, Liar" too), even before the Shadows of Knight brought it to radio. It was usually a barnstormer, filling up the dance floor, sometimes even closing sets. For me, it took Patti Smith's inspired twist on it 10 years later to wake me up to the true dimensions of Van Morrison's amazing rock 'n' roll standard. She turned it into a profane starry-eyed goof on medieval Roman Catholic orthodoxy, as in "Gloria in excelsis Deo." And even then I still had to work my way back through that Shadows of Knight version—the one I knew first and best, which is not bad at all, if a bit on the copycat side with some slight sweetening, and indeed was my official favorite version for a time—to finally get to this good and proper. These mid-'60s Them sessions yielded amazing stuff and you might as well start right here. The attack is pugnacious and sullen, pressing in with deft moves like a pickpocket on a crowded platform, the band a model of tight sharp-elbowed poise, and Morrison raspy and harsh within the melodics of the blues form as only he can be, still a raw talent, prowling the song like a tomcat, arguably learning some of his slinky vocal moves off Mick Jagger, arguably teaching them to Jagger too. Did I mention that it is 1964 and he is 19 years old? You know what he went on to. You know the chorus. This is classic rock in every way that is good.

13. Van Morrison, "Into the Mystic" (1970)

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In previous exercises like this I have (absurdly, I admit) attempted to pass off side 1 of Moondance as "a song," even though there are actually five perfectly distinct songs on it and two of them—"Moondance" and "Crazy Love"—have suffered some exhaustion over these long years. I'm not doing that this time, but you should know that it's one of the great album sides and "Into the Mystic" does work somewhat better in the context of closing out the set, particularly coming after the deceptively gentle rockin' "Caravan" ("turn up your radio, turn it up")—somehow, in the moment, sailing off "into the mystic" seems an obvious next logical step. I might also as well have picked "And it Stoned Me," which opens the set, as it is nearly equally transcendent yet grounded in concrete, quotidian details that somehow add up to the joy he's at pains to communicate, here and all through most of his work ("Oh, the water / Let it run all over me"). Plus it just afforded me the opportunity to mention every song on the side. "Into the Mystic" is the point where Morrison is perhaps most plainly straightforward and yet concise and economical (at 3:30) about his ongoing, career-long project of the pursuit of ecstasy. When he reaches for the heights and unfurls the package and makes the big reveal with "I want to rock your gypsy soul" (yes, that's "gypsy soul"), it's a lot like the feeling I get at the one and only moment of pleasure I still find in flying travel, the moment at takeoff when the craft leaves the ground. Only I'm just sitting at home and Van Morrison is singing and some people are playing in a band, acoustic guitars and saxophones and piano and other things. Oh, and I love this factoid from Wikipedia: "It is among the most popular songs doctors listen to while operating."

91. Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets" (1967)

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Van Morrison was just 21 when he wrote and recorded this remarkable meditation on untimely death, which is stripped down to essentials even though it goes on a long while: a sparse open arrangement with moody distracted guitar licks, equally moody organ fills, piercing harmonica, and the singer trying to deal with the fact that it's the middle of the night, his woman is on her deathbed, and the room is stuffy and smells bad. "I can almost smell your T.B. sheets," he says, muttering to himself, "Gotta go. Gotta get away." "I want a drink of water," he says. "I'll send somebody around later." Legend has it that Morrison broke down in tears after the session, and it's not hard to see how that could happen with something like this, so meticulously imagined. I think the better question may be how a 21-year-old Irish rock 'n' roll lad came to dream up such a thing in the first place (which may or may not be answered in terms of psychic vibrations by the circumstances and events of Morrison's visit to the US during which this was recorded). John Lee Hooker covered it five years later, and it's a worthy version as Hooker certainly has the doomy authority to put it over. But I'm not sure even so that it touches this Morrison original, which is so bold about its stark scenario and candid themes, so rooted in the sensory details of an overwhelming and horrific moment in the lives of two people, of whom we know only their immediate circumstances and nothing else. She is dying. He can't stand it. He can't face it. He flees the scene, leaving the radio on to play for her, and he takes us with him, even if only in his mind, and for our part it's at least as much relief as any he might experience.

Astral Weeks (1968)

To recap: Van Morrison, at 21 a retired principal of rock 'n' roll pioneers Them intent on leaving the music business, lets Them manager/producer Bert Berns talk him into coming to New York to record demos. Berns advances him a one-way airfare. The results of their sessions included "Brown-Eyed Girl" and tracks that appeared variously on Blowin' Your Mind, T.B. Sheets, and elsewhere. Then Bert Berns dies suddenly; his widow and her lawyers effectively prevent Morrison from recording or performing in the New York area (and no airfare home, remember). Morrison travels on to Boston, where he works out the song cycle that would become this album. Many Van Morrison fans put this on their short list of his best, and I think it's pretty good too. But his recent traumas vibrate from this music like a dentist riding a jackhammer, which in the end amounts far more to anxiety than serenity. I mean, I never listen to this music to relax. It's not a bit relaxing.

T.B. Sheets (1967)

This is not entirely a product of its times, but rather a 1974 release that amounts to a subset of the infamous Blowin' Your Mind (the photo of Van Morrison used for that album cover makes a cameo on this cover). But it's the one I discovered as an uncanny kind of revelation in the early '80s. The title song alone, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes and pretty much about exactly what the title indicates, will be "blowin' your mind" no matter how you interpret that term. Then there's "Brown Eyed Girl," which does the same thing in an entirely different way, this one brilliant salvation delivered from the radio. This and everything Van Morrison recorded on his strikingly odd trip to New York City in 1967, bizarrely abandoned to the fates when he was just 21 and already a seasoned veteran of rock 'n' roll, manages to touch the sacred in any number of profound, deeply unsettling, and beautiful ways. A lot of people do well to touch the sacred once in one way in the course of entire careers.

Tupelo Honey (1971)

"You're My Woman" A more worthy follow-up to Moondance than the two immediately before and after this (His Band and the Street Choir and Saint Dominic's Preview), this one might also mark a point where agreements about Van Morrison begin to splinter. I think he's at his best when he sweetens the sauce and lets the music sparkle, holding the line on the longer workouts, which often—not always—drift toward self-indulgence (cf., "Listen to the Lion" on Dominic's). That's exactly what he's done here. Featuring career highwater marks in both "Wild Night" and "You're My Woman," nothing here is less than perfectly fine. The band boasts that Van Morrison specialty of playing both tight and loose all at once (how do they do that?), the tunes are exquisite, the chick singers fantastic, the harpsichord once again works, and the feeling throughout is warm, tender, and sweet. A good one.

Them (1965)

Anyone who might think that Van Morrison is more an artifact and purveyor of '70s post-folk singer/songwriter gentle on my mind fare (not that there's anything wrong with that) is referred directly to this mid-'60s debut of his Belfast band. "Gloria" alone, an instant standard for garage bands worldwide, should answer any further questions, but the yowling kick of the rest is all the way up to that classic and not to be missed. Comparable to early Bruce Springsteen and much of Patti Smith (both clearly influenced by Morrison and Them) in its full-on, breathtaking immersion in tumbling blasts of language—Bob Dylan is somewhat restrained by comparison—the poetry is accompanied by a bluesy band as raw as the scrapes on knees and elbows after a spill from a bicycle. They rock very hard and so does Van Morrison.

Moondance (1970)

This is what comes of return to home and recovery from trauma: Joy, and the lessons of faith. This is not only the best Van Morrison album, it's one of the best ever. Ev-AR. And I say that as someone principally concerned only with the first five songs (or the first vinyl side... the second side is good too). Every second of them is utterly and completely lived and inhabited and felt and communicated. You know the water let it run all over me. You know it's a marvelous night. You know she give him love love love. You know turn it up. Radio. Turn it up. Little bit higher. He turns his top 40 tricks spectacularly on the title song. The radio stations overplayed it, but I never got tired of it. "Crazy Love" – kinda corny, but if this is the weak song we should all have such weaknesses. Words completely fail "Caravan" and "Into the Mystic," but you keep time with them in the center of your soul. I insist that this is the tail end of a trilogy that turned out amazingly well.